Recent Posts

The only thing you are likely to notice about Era, if you aren't deliberately looking for her, is her singing voice. She is otherwise terribly unremarkable... right? Well, maybe not. Like the unique but often-unnoticed country she comes from, Era has hidden talents and a wild side. And be careful: Voldemort might be watching...

It is altogether too easy to walk right by Era without noticing her, at least for her own tastes. She is not visually striking, aside from her habit of dressing in arresting colors, and she doesn't really stand out in a crowd in any other way either. This is all very unfortunate, because she would love to be noticed and important.
Sometimes, Era comes off as self-centered or even bullying in her efforts to counterbalance her unfortunate anonymity. On her very worst days, when everything is gray and it's raining and nobody seems to even care that she exists, she has been known to pick fights and heckle strangers just to make someone notice that she is there. Such days are very rare, however; her usual inclination is more often to try to make someone's day better (or, if that can't be done, she will try to at least make someone's day more strange). In addition, she adheres strictly to a somewhat peculiar code of honor, which does not forbid her from randomly insulting strangers on the street but does ensure that she always picks fights with people who appear to be bigger and stronger than herself.
Era would never tell a lie or break a promise. She is quite adamant about that, and finds this to be useful in her everyday life. It means that once people get to know her, they stop expecting her to lie, making conversation so much simpler even if she doesn't have the same sort of assurance about them. It also means that she is memorable, quite often, as "the one who tells the truth," which is a pleasant concept no matter how disappointing it is to her to be reminded that so many other people don't do the same. Truthful she may be, but Era is for that reason often very suspicious of anyone if she doesn't have any concrete reason to think them honest.
Feeling like she has to fight for every scrap of attention (regardless of whether this feeling is justified in the present time) is fairly exhausting, really, so Era doesn't necessarily enjoy all kinds of socializing. Sometimes she prefers some solitude, where there is no one to worry about. Better yet is to be on stage, in front of people who are watching her. She has not a scrap of stage fright, but loves the idea of being the center of attention. It even gives her confidence, to think that people are watching.
Though it only shows up around her family and close friends, Era has a deeply caring side. She half-expects everyone to rely on her, and does her best to be actually reliable for that purpose. When the sky is (hopefully metaphorically) falling on top of you, Era will be there, with a pep talk and possibly lunch to share.
Just because she's truthful and caring doesn't mean she hasn't got a devious side. It's fairly mild, but if she puts her mind to it, she can get up to all kinds of mischief, and probably will if you get on her bad side, because she has a decided tendency to hold grudges. She is also a gracious hostess. Unrelated, you say? Well, not exactly... just because she's a good hostess doesn't guarantee that she doesn't hate the person she's hosting. It's just that she is good at putting on a sweet and smiling face while dealing with someone she feels it necessary to interact with. She would cheerfully explain her true feelings and motivations... if you bothered to ask. Most don't.
The overall effect of her manner often causes people to misunderstand what sort of person Era is. She has accidentally gathered herself a bit of an odd reputation in certain circles, to the point that she is frequently believed to be a hardened criminal. It's not remotely true, but she knows enough about what actual criminals are doing that she could probably tell you if you asked. Not that she would, unless you gave her a good reason...

+ Singing. Era quite literally likes the sound of her own voice, and enjoys breaking into song whenever she can. Even making it her job hasn't diminished her enthusiasm for it. It's best when she can be the soloist!
+ The zoo. Granted, it would be even more fun to see all those amazing animals in their natural habitat, but it's incredible enough just to get the chance to see them.
+ Religious studies. Era has significant academic interest in all the different things people believe and the different kinds of rituals they enact for religious purposes. She's mostly just curious.
+ Standing out. This rather goes along with her singing, in some ways; Era enjoys being remarkable. Reasonably, she prefers to be a good kind of remarkable, but she will accept less-than-ideal remarks ("You're from Albania? Isn't that where Voldemort used to hang out?") if that becomes her only option to keep people paying attention to her.
+ Reading. It took her just about forever to learn to read and write in English (stupid trick letters everywhere), but she figures it was worth the effort. The opportunities to stay on top of what people are saying and doing and thinking about just can't be replaced.
+ Bright colors. This London place is so dull most of the time; what it really needs is some brightness to shake things up a bit and make the place more cheerful. Maybe paint some of the buildings fluorescent pink with equally fluorescent purple polka dots, or stripes of royal blue and blood red. At the very least, Era herself will be dressed in bright colors.
+ Lunch. Breakfast and dinner are nice and all, but lunch is the best meal of the day. You tire yourself out working all morning, but then you take a break for lunch and you can have an afternoon too!

- Math. She just doesn't understand it, and she isn't willing to put in the effort that would have to go into making sense of it.
- Being ignored. Some people like being left alone, but Era just isn't one of them. She wants to be seen, heard, and spoken to. (Being spoken of is a bonus, but not what she wants most.) When people don't notice her at all, it's just plain frustrating.
- Crowds. Crowded places are the most lonely for Era, far more so than anything that might be described as a "lonely mountain (or lake, woods, etc.)"
- Pushiness. Era does things her own way and doesn't really appreciate being pushed into something that doesn't suit her.
- Being mistaken for a criminal. She's not, okay? But for some reason she tends to catch the unwanted attention of law enforcement...

~ To perform at West End. It's such an impractical dream, but Era admires the famous singers who lead the musicals, and someday she would love to be one of them.
~ To meet J.K. Rowling. She has some questions she'd like to ask about the Grey Lady and the hiding of a certain diadem...
~ To paint the world around her a brighter color. Era sees the world around her as often terribly dull, and she wants to brighten at least her own little corner of it, literally and figuratively.

x Losing her voice. Even a bout of laryngitis is enough to frighten Era. How is she to communicate without it?
x Being totally forgotten. What would happen if nobody cared at all? What would happen if she died and nobody even knew she was gone? Era hates to imagine being erased from memory. If it happened in her lifetime, she would have to build a name for herself anew; if it happened after she died, it would be like dying twice.
x Getting sent to jail. She's done nothing wrong, and yet she knows all too well that that isn't necessarily going to protect her.

Era Kastrati was born a little more than two decades ago in a small town somewhere in central Albania. Her parents were not terribly interesting people: lower-middle-class, young, devoutly Muslim, in every possible way very much like any of their neighbors. She was their second child, and her older brother Ylli—older by three years—wasn't necessarily in favor of having a younger sister. As small children so often do when faced with an unwanted younger sibling, he took to picking on her as a demonstration of his annoyance with this inconvenient intrusion into his nice, orderly life. Their relationship remained rocky, sometimes friendly but often contentious, as relationships between siblings close in age so often are.
When Era was about three or four years old, her parents had another son and named him Pal. That left the family with three children: two boys who were paid plenty of attention because of being the oldest and youngest respectively, and then Era, stuck in the middle and largely forgotten. She tried not to follow Ylli's example with Pal, and did her best to make herself useful and supportive towards her little brother, though sometimes she was overwhelmed by jealousy despite her best intentions.
It came as a shock, when Era was eight, that her brother Ylli was killed in an accident. As the oldest surviving child in the household, she tried very hard to be supportive of all her family while dealing with her own confusion and grief. The incident took a serious toll on everyone, and Era ended up often hiding in corners with Pal while their parents got into increasingly vicious arguments. At the end of it all, their father simply left the family, leaving their mother to raise the two surviving children on her own.
For the remaining years of her childhood, Era found herself working rather hard in order to keep up with everything that was going on. She even did pretty well at that, up until she was about fourteen or fifteen. Most teenagers start wanting to assert their individuality around that age; Era was no different. Her rebellious stage was certainly attention-seeking, though that was no surprise given how easy she had been to ignore, but also a sign of a desire to become an adult distinct from her mother. One of the milder aspects of this was that Era began to develop an interest in some rather unusual academic fields. She started finding places to sit and read books. It was then that she began teaching herself to speak and read English; the speaking part was not too difficult (though she had a distinct accent that never entirely disappeared), but the reading part took her many years to master.
The aspect of Era's teenage rebellion that most horrified her deeply religious mother was not that she cut her formerly long hair short (which turned out to be a practical choice, and so comfortable for her that she never let her hair grow much longer than shoulder-length ever after), nor even her flirtation with low-neck shirts. It was something much less obvious, something that her mother didn't even know about until it several months after the fact. No, Era did not get a weird but discreet tattoo; she became an atheist. Her mother was scandalized, but couldn't really do anything about it because Era was entirely uninterested in being talked into reconverting. It wasn't like there weren't plenty of others around, either.
At the age of eighteen, having finally mastered English orthography (as much as anyone ever does), Era came by a certain book written in English which caught her attention. It looked like a children's book, and in a sense it was. The title struck her as a bit odd: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. The rest, as they say, is history. She was fascinated by what she read. That was the spark that led her first to read the rest of the series, then to learn more about England, then to purpose to move there.
To make a long story short, she successfully applied to Westminster University and did move to London. Once there, she ran into a certain degree of culture shock, but tried to ignore it and adjusted as best she could. In order to help pay her expenses, she found a job as a singer at a less-than-well-reputed dining establishment, and often picked up shifts waiting tables to supplement that. It was good, honest work, but between her distinctly foreign accent and being seen at the wrong end of town a little too often, Era herself gained a reputation in certain circles as "probably up to something shady." Unfortunately, "certain circles" included law enforcement circles.
Despite being up to nothing shady at all, it was often the case that Era heard things about those who were, in the course of her work. Not on purpose, understand... you just overhear things, and sometimes even your voice can't drown it out. And sometimes you see things, and once you've noticed what's going on it's hard to forget. This didn't affect her behavior at all for a while, until the day that a suspicious bobby got too suspicious and brought her in for questioning.
Era knew very little about the matter she was questioned about. She had seen the involved parties together, but there wasn't terribly much more that she could offer no matter how hard they pushed. It was hard to convince them that she really didn't have anything to do with the matter, but eventually she got her point across.
That was the first time people came to her asking for information, but it was far from the last. Some of them were frightening. Others, however, offered her things. Useful things, like money. Era was afraid at first. What should she do?
What she ended up doing was seeking out more information. People were going to assume she knew things, either way; she might as well actually know things. She took to gossiping with those around her, in hopes of picking up more interesting tidbits. She started to make friends—or, at least, acquaintances—in the underworld, aiming (less-successfully) to also make friends in high places, gleaning knowledge from them. She was always frank with potential customers about her lack of involvement in such things herself.
Preparing as she is to graduate soon, Era has plans for the future, involving academia and perhaps a little more singing. Or a lot more singing, and perhaps gleaning some more knowledge with it...

"You're an idiot, Kastrati."
Era looked up to see who was addressing her so. It was her boss. "I beg your pardon?" she replied sweetly. She knew perfectly well what she'd done. It wasn't her fault that that idiot had decided to smack her in a body part she was disinclined to allow to be touched without permission, and it certainly wasn't her fault that she had happened to be carrying an open bottle of red wine at the time. If the wine had happened to slip out of her hands and add a touch of color to the man's disgracefully boring white shirt, well, how was that her problem?
The idiot—er, the customer, that was—had evidently complained to her boss; she could see him in the corner where the boss usually stood to watch what was going on. Era didn't really care. She hadn't actively intended to dump wine all over him, which was reason enough, she concluded, to play innocent. Reflex, she would say. Clumsy hands. She was just so shocked that someone would touch her like that. All true enough, and all probably anticipated in the boss' opening comment.
The man was hopping mad, evidently so much so that he had ceased to try to pull the (admittedly large) wine-soaked portions of his shirt away from his body, being concerned only with exacting retribution. It was too bad, Era mused; she might have brushed the initial incident off, but if he was going to push at it, then she would surely have to respond in kind.
Hopefully, her boss would ask her for an explanation. She would gladly supply a complete and honest one. There was a certain kind of revenge in telling awkward truths, she found. And if she couldn't get her meaning across... well, she had learned ways of finding out details that people might wish to keep hidden. Perhaps this man would be a good subject for such an endeavor.